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Schindler's Ark

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Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning, fictionalized biography of Oskar Schindler memorializes a member of the Nazi party who endangered his own life for four years, working privately to save Jews from the death camps. A playboy who loved fine wines and foods, he was also a smooth-talking manipulator (and briber) of Nazi officials, as well as a clever entrepreneur, already on his way to stunning financial success by the early days of World War II. Nowhere in Schindler's background are there any hints that he would one day become the savior of eleven hundred Jewish men and women.

While the excellent film of this novel concentrates on the dangers Schindler and "his Jews" faced daily throughout the war, Keneally, well known for his depictions of characters acting under stress, concentrates on the character of Oskar Schindler himself, beginning with his childhood and teen years. As he explores Schindler's transformation from war profiteer and "passive" Nazi to a man willing to use his fortune to ensure the salvation of his factory workers, Keneally reveals a man of enormous courage and derring-do, a man who thrives by living on the edge.

Presenting episodes from the lives of some of the "Schindlerjuden," Keneally highlights their humanity, creating moments of high drama. Characters such as Leopold Pfefferberg and factory manager Itzhak Stern move in and out of the narrative, illustrating graphically the extent to which their lives depend upon Oskar Schindler, while the constant intrusion of sadistic SS commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's life shows the fragility of their security. Other stories, of people who just missed being saved by Schindler, highlight the arbitrariness of fate--chance--in their (and our) lives.

Throughout the novel, Keneally stresses the importance of bearing witness and testifying to the atrocities. In one of the novel's most moving passages, Schindler and his lover ride horses to a ridge where they can view the expulsion of the Jews from the Krakow ghetto, watching, horrified, as old or crippled laggards are murdered in front of Jewish children. "They permitted witnesses because they believed the witnesses, all, would perish, too." Later, Schindler works with a Zionist rescue organization, secretly going to Budapest to testify about the hidden death camps.

Schindler's heroism, his goodness within a country committed to the extermination of other humans, his recognition that witnesses are essential, and his ability to use the system in order to hasten its end bring this story of one man's fight against the Holocaust to life. But it is Keneally's incorporation of Schindler's faults and excesses which gives texture and depth to this portrait and make Schindler a character with whom the reader can identify. Keneally's meticulous research and his portrait of Schindler after the war, beloved by Jews but at loose ends personally and professionally, make this novel an unforgettable study of character and time. Mary Whipple

"The unconditional surrender of Germany," he said, has just been announced. After six years of the cruel murder of human beings, victims are being mourned, and Europe is now trying to return to peace and order".

Schindler's Ark tells a true story about a German gentleman, drinker and a womanizer who saved many Jewish lives during World War II. This powerful novel gives off a realistic sense of terror, describes the many horrific events and lots of romances being painfully torn apart. This is about a man who wrote a list, a list that made a great impact on many people's lives until one day when it all goes wrong.

Thomas Keneally has told the story in a way which will grip the reader. The reader will go through a whole array of emotions. This book invites us all to remember those lives, some of whom were taken and some of whom have changed forever! After all, this is a true story!

"The dust of the dead fell in hair and on the clothing hung in the back gardens of junior officers' villas".

This book is best suited for ages 13 and up.

This review is dedicated by a Jew and Zionist Until Death, myself! , To the Righteous among the Nations, those Gentiles who have stood by the Jewish Nation in times of travail and murder, and those who continue to stand by Jews and Israel, in these frightening and sombre times of today.

Many people have wondered how the nation that gave us such great contributors to humanity, such as the Statesman Frederick the Great, the poet and writer Johan Goethe, and musicians such as Bach and Beethoven, could have allowed themselves to be led by the Satanic Adolph Hitler (may his evil name be erased from history) produced the SS and Gestapo, and allowed those evil forces to carry out the Holocaust against 6 million Jewish men, women and children, as well as millions of Roma, disabled people , Slavs and Armenians.

An yet we must not forget the righteous among the nations, which included Germans like Pastor Niemoller and Konrad Adenauer, who opposed the monstrous Nazi tyranny, and Oskar Schindler (and Emily Schindler) among others, who put their own lives on the line to save Jewish lives.

Oskar Schindler was a maverick Sudeten German industrialist, who put his life and livelihood on the line to save 6 000 Jews from the Nazi death machine.

Unlike the move "Schindler's List", in this book we read something of the world before and after World War II and the Holocaust (Shoah).

Hence we see something of the anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church, and how the centuries of Catholic poison against the Jewish people, in some ways paved the way for the horrors of the Shoah (as well as having caused untold suffering and death to Jews through the centuries - since Roman times! -and it continues to cause suffering and death today to Jews when the Catholic Church sides with Palestinian terrorists against innocent Israeli Jewish women and children!

In 1929 Oskar Schindler married Emilie, a German speaking Catholic girl (who would prove to have a heart of gold, but would be treated shabbily by Oskar). From her girlhood Emilie would have a close friendship with the daughter of the local Jewish storekeeper in her village, Rita Reiff.

On a visit to Emile's father, the parish priest told him that it was not good , in principle , for a Catholic girl to have a friendship with a Jew. It is a testament to Emilie's character that she resisted the edict of the bigoted priest, and remained a close friend Rita's, until Rita was executed by Nazi officials, in front of the store, in 1942.

It is a testament to the love and honour that Schindler would be held in by the Jews he saved and their descendents, that when this book was written by Thomas Keneally in 1982 (37 years after the war and 8 years after Oskar Schindler passed away) that a family called the C's who spread malicious rumours about Schindlers, still had to be protected by being granted anonymity by the author! Clearly the Schindlerjuden or their children or grandchildren could take revenge against the C's if the author had revealed their identity!

He was not held by all Germans with such esteem after the war, and as late as the 1960's were spat out and verbally attacked on the streets of Frankfurt (but more of that later).

Just as there have always been a handful of righteous Gentiles, so too there have always been Jews who have acted in ways that have brought destruction on their own people.
The Judenrat (The Nazi puppet councils of Jews) that helped the Nazis oppress their own people, where mainly made up of secular intellectuals, as are the leftist Jewish traitors today, like the loathsome Noam Chomsky, who back the `Palestinian' efforts to destroy the tiny Jewish State of Israel, and thereby subject the Jewish people to a second holocaust.

Over half of all holocaust survivors today live in Israel (as do many descendants of holocaust survivors), and it would be a hideous twist of history for these too to perish in the flames of anti-Jew hatred, as they would do if Israel was destroyed by forces of evil (G-D forbid that this should ever be allowed to happen!)

Towards his later life in the 1960's and early 70's Schindler would be well looked after by the Schindlerjuden in Israel (where he spent half of every year, spending the other half in Germany in poverty and loneliness), and he would choose to be buried in Jerusalem.

Many Schindler Jews mourned him at his funeral in Jerusalem in 1974.

While we will always remember evil enemies of our people those like Pharaoh Amalek, Haman, Torquemada, Chmielnicki, Hitler, Stalin, Gaddafi Arafat, Edward Said and Chomsky (may their souls be eternally erased), we too must remember the Righteous Among the Nations such as Rahab, Emperor Darius, Pastor Niemoller, Oskar and Emilie Schindler , Reverend Pat Robertson , David Dolan and Mike Evans (may they be eternally blessed).